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“Century’s Witness: The Extraordinary Life of Journalist Wallace Carroll” has won the Gold Medal for biography in the IBPA Benjamin Franklin Book-ofthe- Year Award and the Gold Medal IPPY in the Southeast – Best Regional Non-Fiction category.
The biography is also a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award and for the International Next Generation Indie Book Awards (NGIBA).
The author, Mary Llewellyn McNeil, lives part-time in Brownsburg. The editor, Lisa Tracy, is a Lexington resident, and the publisher, Whaler Books, an imprint of Mariner Publishing, is based in Buena Vista.
Pulitzer Prize winner and Washington Post columnist George Will has called the book “a trip back in time when that phrase did not strike most Americans as an oxymoron, and when vibrant local newspapers were both causes and effects of national vigor.” Jon Sawyer, executive director of the Pulitzer Center, hailed it “the best roadmap I know if we aim to restore journalism’s power to inform and persuade.” And Mark Nelson of the Center for International Media Assistance described it as “A well-researched and captivating read.”
“Century’s Witness” tells the story of Wallace Carroll, one of the most respected and influential journalists of the 20th century. His career spanned 45 years. As a United Press correspondent before and during World War II, deputy director of the Office of War Information, news editor of the Washington Bureau of the New York Times, and finally editor and publisher of the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel, Carroll covered most of the significant events of the century, from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 to the end of the Vietnam War.
“Filled with ‘you are there’ stories and interviews with the likes of Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, and Josef Stalin, among others, Carroll represented the gold standard of news reporting. His example, captured by Mary McNeil — a former student of Carroll’s — influenced a generation of reporters, editors, and publishers and gives us journalistic principles well worth revisiting today,” said a spokeperson.
The IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award program includes over 50 categories and is regarded as one of the highest national honors in independent publishing. The IPPY awards is the world’s largest book publishing contest.
